Sunday, August 2, 2015

Saturday evening (8/1) I co-officiated Ellen and
Nate's wedding ceremony with Father Richard Thibodeau, at St. Mary's of the
Assumption in New Orleans, Louisiana. Here are the remarks I shared
with them and their guests:

I ask each person I marry to write about themselves. Now, Ellen and Nate, this
might surprise a poet and a fiction writer: Writing, like anything else, is
something some people are good at, and some people less so. So, I was excited
to read the essays of a trained poet, Nate, and a trained fiction writer,
Ellen, who I was impressed to find has a long list of publications, available
on Amazon, by the way!

I ask each person to write about a few different points. One of these is how
they met. Here is how our poet describes the place they met: "Lake Charles is a small
city on the north-east shore of the eponymous lake. Because of the unique
geographical situation of South Louisiana, Lake Charles
contains a port that can accommodate ocean-going vessels, but it is
nevertheless separated from the Gulf of Mexico
by about two thousand square miles of salt and freshwater marsh. For this
reason, living there can sometimes feel like living at the ends of the
Earth." He's not that bad at prose either, is he? And yes, this is the
first of some 600 essays like these I have read with the word eponymous...

Now, you may protest, that I left out the part about how they met. Wasn't that
the point? Well, no. The point was to describe the setting, because to Ellen
and Nate the setting is integral to their story. Once again, here is Nate:
"Ellen, from Chicago, and I, from Roanoke,
both moved to this strange and romantic clime sight unseen. I’d like to think
that this really rash life decision shows not utter foolishness on both of our
parts, but daring and a willingness to discover our destiny. As it turned out,
our destiny was to meet one another and fall in love.​"

Now, why do I use the word "setting" and not the word
"place". Well, I feel that if you just keep Nate's poetic description
in mind, you already have the answer. It wasn't about a place, it was so much richer
than that. They were at the ends of the earth, in a strange and romantic clime.
That is a setting. And I belabor that point because Ellen says that growing up,
like many writers and romantics, she "always had trouble feeling connected
to people and rooted to a place." With Nate in that setting she
discovered, in her words, "there is no time or place, it is just us in a
vast, beautiful world with so much to learn and experience."

This desire to connect and find peace has led Ellen to her deeply spiritual
practice of Yoga. "When I move with my breath," she says, "I am
able to quiet my mind and exist in a place of just be-ing... I have learned
that I can just be and that I am not my thoughts." But once again, the
partnership with Nate is key: "Off the yoga mat, it is a lot harder to
remain unattached from your thoughts and anxieties. In so many ways, Nate has
taught me how to be in the moment and experience more divine-ness every
day."

This purity she describes, where feelings become so real, you can almost touch
them, is something that Nate echoes when he speaks of his feelings for Ellen,
and what they share. This should tell you all you need to know about their love
story, and these words need no commentary: "We have a love that feels
palpably real and true, and that becomes richer and more complex with each
passing day we spend together... We are best friends and a great team. Our time
together has almost exclusively been a time of laughter, trust, and
unadulterated satisfaction and joy. This is, I am very sure, the way that love
is when it is pure."